Tag Archives: Text

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far away … no – not quite so long, and not quite so far away, a young man, whose many names I would not be able to write down here (ok, here is one: Taumel), gave into my hands a book. Well, now this is no curious thing, you think, that’s right, but let me tell you more. There were white letters on the black cover, which did not make sense to me: Alastor.
Grinning from one ear to the other, my friend whispered to me, that THIS was ‘truely a Vance’! And – hush – in bright blue letters, not quite as huge as the white characters, there was the name Jack Vance printed on the book.
Why, this book contained more pages than I first thought and I was not really fast in reading then. But on the advise of my good friend I began to read. I noticed that the book contained three separate novels taking place in the same universe, but the stories were not reffering to each other.

The fascinating exotic worlds catched my interest. Soon I reached the last book: Wyst: Alastor 1716
The protagonist in this book is a person I was easily able to identify myself with, for his wish to be an artist in drawing and painting is very familiar to me.
With more enthusiasm than ever I read the adventures of Jantiff Ravensroke from Frayness on a planet called Zeck, who wants to study the Colors under the light of the white star Dwan on the planet Wyst and who has to establish, that this ‘utopia’ doesn’t really have such an egalitary system as it is said of. Things are being stolen as ‘needed’ and suddenly Jantiff is pushed into a very strange adventure-like story …
I do not want to retell the whole story here (I even do not have good enough english), but this book was my personal introduction to the fantastic worlds of Jack Vance. In the years after I devoured all books I was able to get from this fabulous author. Thank you, Jack Vance! Thanks for all the hours I was allowed to engross into your worlds.

Much more information about Jack Vance, who unfortunately died in May 2013, you can find on the official Jack Vance Website. May his books feed the fantasy of hundreds of thousands of readers on this and other worlds.

PS: Another great tip for reading are the adventures of Cugel the Clever (Amazon E-Book).

The Swabian language continues to surprise me again and again. Recently my wife and I repeatedly encountered the term “fei” (spelled something like “fy”). Fei is included in Swabian sentences to give them emphasis: “Des isch fei was wert. Do ka’sch fei was drauf geaba.” or similar. In the region called Allgäu where I come from they also had this term. But as a child I misunderstood it as being “frei”. I thought it came from the german word “freilich” which means “certainly”. Nowadays it is very easy to research such things. The richness of knowledge in the World Wide Web made it easy for us to find out. The term comes from the german word “feien” (see Duden online). Originally it was spelled “veien” (in Middle High German) and meant “protect something with fairy magic”.
So, if we strengthen our sentences with the word “fei”, our statements will be immune to any inconvenience. Well, that’s “fei” even more fun to pursue this local custom.

PS: This term is not only used in Swabian language. There are other dialects that also use it. E.g. Sandy acknowledged it for the Erz Mountains.

Ambigrams

Some years ago one of my stepsons began drawing Ambigrams for some curious reasons. They also fascinated me, but I had no time then and forgot about ambigrams until I had to create one for an illustration job. As long as you don’t bother about readability, you can make an ambigram for every word. In my case it was the name of a castle in germany called Rieneck. Here it is:

Anagrams

I always was fascinated of Anagrams: changing the order of the letters of words and getting other meanings (In my childhood I liked to play with alphabet biscuits, “Russischbrot”, before I ate them. Uhm, did I say in my childhood … well, I still like it…). Today there are several online and offline word generators to generate anagrams, e.g. an, where you can select various languages. You can find quite funny things when examining your name’s letters.

Palindromes

I always wondered what “They might be Giants” sing about in their song “I Palindrome I” but I didn’t look it up until I stumbled upon it when researching ambigrams. Palindromes are words or sentences that can be read both forwards and backwards and still have the same meaning. Well, I knew there were words and sentences you can do this with, but I didn’t know the word for it. So, after knowing that, the previously mentioned song of TMBG is even cooler. They have palindrome phrases and word-symmetrical sentences in it.

Besides palindromes there are semi-palindromes that can be read forwards and backwards with different meanings which are often used for palindrome sentences like “Ivan – Navi” 🙂

Pangrams

When I researched for palindromes I also read about pangrams. I didn’t know there was a word for this: A sentence with all letters of the alphabet in it. You may all know the sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”. This english pangram today is mostly known from e.g. the Windows Font Previewer. Its’ origin goes back to 1885, where the sentence “A quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” was suggested for writing practice in an article of a teachers’ journal called “The Michigan School Moderator”. In german language, the most known pangram might be “Franz jagt im komplett verwahrlosten Taxi quer durch Bayern”, although it does not have umlauts (mutated vowels). My preferred one with umlauts is “Welch fieser Katzentyp quält da süße Vögel bloß zum Jux?”

I like fonts. I really like fonts. Typography is a really interesting thing. With the right font you can emphasize the meaning of your text so heavily.

As my wife and I love nostalgic things, we often go to flea markets. Once we found a real treasure: An old, handwritten doctoral thesis. I like old handwriting and so I started to build a handwriting font.

You can see and download the font called handwriting1800 (TTF) at my deviantart stock account page, and many free font pages also have listed it by now (although the newest version can be found on my deviantart page always).

I hope you like it. If you use it, I would love to see what you did with it (send me an email or a note on deviantart).